The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence

By Thomas J. Peters

"It is [Tom] Peters—as consultant, writer, columnist, seminar lecturer, and stage performer—whose energy, style, influence, and ideas have [most] shaped new management thinking.” —Movers and Shakers: The 100 Most Influential Figures in Modern Business

“We live in a Tom Peters world.” —Fortune Magazine

Business uber-guru Tom Peters is back with his first book in a decade, The Little Big Things. In this age of economic recession and financial uncertainty, the patented Peters approach to business and management—no-nonsense, witty, down-to-earth, insightful—is more pertinent now than ever. As essential for small-business owners as it is for the heads of major corporations, The Little Big Things is a rousing call-to-arms to American business to get “back to the basics” of running a successful enterprise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9780061963506

Thomas J. Peters

Thomas J. Peters, "uber-guru of business" (Fortune and The Economist), is the author of many international bestsellers, including A Passion for Excellence and Thriving on Chaos. Peters, "the father of the post-modern corporation" (Los Angeles Times), is the chairman of Tom Peters Company and lives in Vermont.

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Introduction

On July 28, 2004, I made my first blog post at tompeters.com. The topic was then Illinois state senator Barack Obama’s speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. In an apolitical post, I said that it had been one helluva speech—take it from someone who knows a good speech when he hears one. (Me.) Since then I’ve made over 1,700 posts, and with the help of many friends the blog has prospered—even bagging a Top 500 designation in 2007!

On September 18, six weeks after beginning my blogging adventure, I happened by a particularly messy chain-store branch in the Natick Mall outside of Boston. I followed the visit with a spur-of-the-moment, throwaway post that I called 100 Ways to Succeed/Make Money #1: THE CLEAN & NEAT TEAM! (TEAM TIDY?); I suggested that the store’s blatant disarray screamed …

We don’t care.

I said that stores, and even accounting offices, were judged as much or more on appearance as on substance. The appearance is a nontrivial part of the overall assessment of the substance—in fact, a part of the substance.

I promised that I’d proceed to supply 100 such success tips—God alone knows why!

I enjoyed the process, and by July 2009 we’d posted precisely 176 of the promised 100! Somewhere along the way, Bob Miller, first boss of the publisher Hyperion, and currently launching HarperStudio, ran (surfed) across the tips, got in touch with us, and said, in effect, You’ve inadvertently written a book. He sent along a contract—and we signed, despite my prior vow, recorded in blood, that I’d never write another book. But, hey, why not, a few books sold, a little publicity—and no work!

Ha!

I have a very low dissatisfaction threshold, and don’t think a book is a book until it’s been through about a dozen major redrafts—and this one has been no exception. I more or less sacrificed the full summer of 2009 on my glorious farm in Vermont to editing and editing and editing—and you’ll see the product here. (For better or for worse.)

All of which is to say that in some respects this is not a normal book—or I guess it probably is, circa 2010. That is, it is derived from a blog—even if now the original is barely recognizable. Among other things, that means that the structure does not follow a tidy plotline. We have organized stuff in appropriate pots, but what you see is what you get. It’s a book of tips or notions or suggestions or actionable ideas, more or less as they arrived at tompeters.com. They were based on observations that flowed from my travels (mainly international these days), the news of the day, exchanges with some of the tens of thousands of people who’ve attended my seminars, from Bucharest to Shanghai to Tallinn, and things large and mostly small that have pissed me off along the way. (I argue here and elsewhere that the only effective source of innovation is pissed-off people! Hence, bite your tongue and cherish such misfits! I, in fact, have been tolerated—or not—along the way. Cf. McKinsey and Me, 1974–1981; McKinsey and Me Part Company, circa 1981.)

Not many of these more or less tips are oceanic. That is, they are mostly, as the book’s title suggests … little BIG things. Little BIG things such as my reaction to the messy store—or, alternatively, a spectacularly clean bathroom, complete with several decades of family photos, at the Wagon Wheel Country Drive-in restaurant in Gill, Massachusetts. They are little—a mere restroom at a smallish restaurant in a wee town you’ve doubtless never heard of. (Applicability in Tallinn?) But they are also, indeed, BIG—including in Tallinn. That is, the restaurant’s We care so much we can taste it or the chain store’s We don’t care, We can’t be bothered is at the heart of the BIG idea of so-called experience marketing—which in turn is the heart of value-added in a crowded marketplace for damn near everything damn near everywhere that insists on such value-added for survival.

In general, I am a sucker for a little, comprehensible, compelling nugget of a life experience that is representative of a BIG and Potent Idea; I prefer such an illustration to some elaborate example in a pithy tome from the Harvard Business School Press—complete with charts and graphs! (I suppose this predilection means I’ve traveled a long way from my engineering training, my MBA, and that McKinsey stint—in all of which complex analysis rules; something that you can understand is considered a less-than-powerful strategic insight. Whoops—I think I just inadvertently explained the super-super-senior-derivates-that-defied-comprehension problem that brought you and me and the global economy to our collective knees.) But I am, in my passion for little stories with real people as the principal players, being consistent with my approach and fervent and guiding belief about effective enterprises first exhibited in public in 1982 in a book I cowrote with Bob Waterman called In Search of Excellence.

The main takeaway from that book, as I still see it almost three decades later, was a simple (little BIG thing) assertion that was our de facto six-word motto:

Hard is soft. Soft is hard.

Search was to a significant extent a response to the Japanese challenging American economic hegemony and beating the hell out of us in the auto market in the 1970s, based not on a sophisticated analysis of the U.S. market concocted by a brigade of MBAs, but … on offering up cars that worked. (Better quality.) So Bob and I slapped the regnant strategy-first mavens in the face and said that the ‘hard’ numbers were the true soft stuff—encompassing a ridiculously limited slice of reality. And such purportedly soft things as quality, people and relationships, core values, closeness to the customer, and, thank you Hewlett-Packard, Managing By Wandering Around, or MBWA, were the true hard stuff—these aspects of business were not fluff-soft, as disdainfully portrayed by the likes of McKinsey and the B-schools, including mighty Stanford, from which both Bob and I had graduated with an MBA. (We were also both engineers and both McKinsey partners.)

We tried our best—to, alas, I must ruefully admit, little avail.

The Enron fiasco, crafted by Harvard B-School- and McKinseytrained Jeff Skilling, was a classic case, circa 2001, of the lingering reality of numbers over good sense. And, God knows, the mega-crash of 2007++ was led by phony-soft numbers and delusional advanced math and a total lack of good sense.

Well, this book is another effort to right the ship!

In fact, an inbred and determined back-to-basics streak has engulfed me in the last couple or so years. In part, it’s in reaction to the entirely preventable financial madness that surrounds us, but it’s also, perhaps, a result of a modest pushback against the hyper-hyped-over-the-top-breathlessly-breathless absolutely everything we know about everything has changed air surrounding the likes of Google, iPhones, Facebook, and Twitter.

I do blog, and blog assiduously; hence, this book. And I do in fact tweet and enjoy it and find it powerful and useful as well as pleasurable—so I hardly merit a Luddite badge.

But still …

Oddly, the icing on the cake, the motivational engine, the final flash of re-realization about those eternal basics can be traced to a single, slim volume I read in 2008, at the height of the endless Vermont winter, while on vacation in New Zealand. The book, by David Stewart, is titled The Summer of 1787. It is a day-to-day account of the writing of the U.S. Constitution, a grand happening and a landmark in human history, which occurred during a mercilessly hot and humid summer in a hopelessly stuffy, closed-windows room in Philadelphia. (I know of what I speak when I assert that the weather was dispiriting—I grew up near neighboring Baltimore.) I underscore the heat and humidity, because it per se was one of those little BIG things that had an enormous impact on the final outcome.

The delegates would often break early to escape the elements, turning over the writing of some key clause to a little subcommittee that would in turn retire to a Philly pub to do their monumental (as we now see it) work. The subcommittee members rarely included grandees such as old Ben Franklin or young James Madison; instead the group likely consisted of four delegates from God knows where with God knows what qualifications (in many cases, not many qualifications) who had simply raised their hands and gotten the mostly unwanted assignment, a little BIG assignment, as it turned out, to shape some essential part of the workings of what has ended up becoming the most powerful nation in world history.

But it was more than the weather basic that shaped the outcome. Hard as it may be to swallow today, some states simply didn’t bother to send delegates, not thinking the whole exercise was of much import. And the New York delegation, for example, never had a quorum present in the hall—hence never cast a single vote. Furthermore, states that did bother to come could determine the size of their contingent, and wee (then and now) Delaware showed up big time and sent five representatives—and the five were present every damn day from the opening bell to the closing bell. And they voted on every-damn-thing, and because of their numbers—5 out of just 30 on the floor on average that summer—ended up volunteering for many, many a crucial subcommittee assignment. Wee Delaware’s impact on the final document is stratospheric.

There’s the little BIG thing called showing up, Delaware style, and then there’s, um, showing up: Yet another mundane but potent-beyond-measure determinant of the final document came via delegates and delegations that showed up in Philadelphia with rough drafts of parts of the proposed document in hand; for lack of better guidance (Madison’s soaring rhetoric was a bit over the top for a sizable chunk of this oft ordinary gang), numerous rough drafts carried to the Convention got tidied up a bit, and became pillars of the final product.

And then there was plain-old-down-and-dirty-with-us-through-the-ages horse trading, where the toughest or most wily bargainers prevailed. To a large extent, success at that eternal basic is the reason slavery remained intact in the final document. The Northerners won the rhetoric battle—and the Southerners, South Carolinians in particular, were the tougher and more persistent and stubborn and sometimes devious horse traders.

The frequently tawdry affairs chronicled in Mr. Stewart’s book made me laugh out loud at several occasions, despite the gravity of the topic; and it reminded me of the decisive role in anything, including the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, of numerous little BIG things—like showing up, and showing up with a draft document in tow, and then sticking around from the opening to the closing bell. And bringing the right temperament to the party: One of the most apparently powerful delegates played an inconsequential role—because he was deemed by his peers to be a windbag and given to bombast; hence, his mates refused to accept him as a member of any subcommittee. They wanted to be done and go home—and not linger, thanks to our windy forebear, in a stuffy little room in swampy Philly in August.

Economists and strategy gurus ordinarily … just don’t get it. (It being this mundane soft, Philadelphia-flavor stuff.) So I have been determined here to produce what, as subtext, emphasizes the stuff that really matters in getting things done—the little BIG things.

My colleagues and I mostly expect you to read the book while sitting on the toilet. (Literally or figuratively.) That is, we hardly imagine that you’ll breathlessly read what follows from start to finish—John le Carré or Alan Furst I am not. Instead, I imagine you’ll look at this idea or that—and I obviously hope that a few will be compelling enough to induce you to take action, to try out one of these little BIG things, maybe even eventually include it in your canon.

Which is hardly to suggest that because these ideas are apparently simple—that they are therefore no-brainers to incorporate in your daily affairs. For example, the day I finished off this introduction, I also presented a seminar in Manchester, England. At one point I had a lengthy exchange with a technically trained and disposed chap who ran an engineering-services company. The topic was the power of expressed appreciation—more specifically, saying Thank you with some regularity, or great regularity, which so graphically acknowledges the value of the recipient, maid or manager. Like many, many others, especially men, my engineer-leader not only doesn’t say those two words often, but actually doesn’t understand how to. His how to question to me was obviously from the heart—and a brave heart indeed to broach the personal and emotional subject in a public setting. The point is, he got it, at least intellectually, and got the point of the power of this sort of gesture, regularized. It was a fine discussion—underscoring little BIG, and also the fact that there is a genuine discipline, worthy of a methodical engineer’s careful consideration, associated with this flavor of apparently mundane activity. From one just-the-facts engineer to another, I wish him well, and if he does enter appreciation into his canon, that alone will have made my 6,000-mile round-trip across the Atlantic and back worthwhile.

There are, derivative of the anecdote about my engineer colleague just mentioned, two other essential themes I want to note before whisking you on your way. First, I wish to be crystal clear about one essential aspect of the … Hard is soft, Soft is hard … notion that de facto animates the entire book. Ideas like conscientiously showing appreciation are matchless signs of humanity—and the practice thereof, in my opinion, doubtless makes you a better person, a person behaving decently in a hurried and harried world. But, to the principal point of this book, such acts also result in dramatically improved organizational effectiveness—and goals more readily achieved; whether those goals involve profitability or provision of human services by nonprofits, NGOs, or government agencies. Acts of appreciation, to stick with my theme of the moment, are masterful, even peerless, ways of enthusing staff and partner and client alike, and, hence, greasing the way to rapid implementation of damn near anything. That is, Soft is hard is wholly pragmatic—and more often than not, effectively implemented, makes the bottom line blossom!

Second, obviously you learn to fly-fish or play the piano or build cabinets by working your butt off and valiantly attempting to master the craft. So, too, to do financial analysis or plan marketing campaigns. Well, in this book I argue that the stuff that matters is the likes of intensive and engaged listening and showing appreciation of the work and wisdom of others, any and all others. And I argue and fervently believe that you can study these full-blown disciplines and practice these full-blown disciplines and become, say, a full-fledged "professional listener. I suggest, for example, that effective strategic listening" is a key, perhaps the key, to lasting, strategic customer relationships—and top-flight professional mastery of listening per se beats, on the power scale, quantitative marketing analysis tools pretty much every time, from the world of that little restaurant in Gill, Massachusetts, to the world of an Airbus sale to Emirates Air, or the eradication of malaria in some part of Africa.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. I hope you enjoy—and I hope you ponder and then work diligently on some of the little BIG things that overwhelmingly determine effective project implementation and career success and customer contentment and employee engagement and business profitability and the shape of the likes of the U.S. Constitution!

A BLINDING FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS

Alas, I confess to having begun this introduction with a lie. (Not a very good start.) I said I’d begun the success tips, as we initially called them, on September 18, 2004. That was true—that is, the tips—but the book actually began on about August 9, 1966. That’s 44 years, 1 month, and 26 days ago as I write.

On August 9 I boarded a U.S. Air Force C-141 in San Bernardino County, California, and began the journey to Danang, Republic of Vietnam—there was a stop in Guam along the way. I was a U.S. Navy combat engineer, or Seabee, to use our ID.

It was my first real job.

(Besides summer stuff, including waiting tables, for nine years in high school and college, and the like.)

This book is up close and personal—and it took all damned 44 years to write. There were those incidents and accidents (thank you, Paul Simon) that triggered many of the tips at the blog. But mostly, it is a reflection of the Seabees, the Pentagon, the White House and Office of Management and Budget, Stanford, McKinsey, my own company, decades of off-and-on research—and contact with some of the roughly 3,000,000 thoughtful-curious people who’ve attended my seminars in 67 countries since about 1980.

I’ve learned a lot of stuff. Well, maybe, maybe not. I’ve seen a lot of stuff—and perhaps learned a little along the way. For example, I’ve met great leaders—from 2-person companies and 200,000-person companies and government agencies and elementary schools; and I’ve met some, let’s say, real beauts! (Both sorts abet the learning process. Here’s to the jerks as well as the saints.)

Truth be known, engineering training and German bloodline notwithstanding, I’m not much of a linear thinker—so my secret is that I run into stuff I care like hell about, and make it into one of Tom’s passions, as my wife calls them, for a year or two or 10 or even 20. It need not fit tightly into a framework, like Michael Porter’s work—it’s just stuff that’s damned important that people are foolishly paying little or no attention to, according to me.

That stuff includes: Germany’s Mittelstand (mid-sized companies) that often lead the world in exports; Design (!!); execution (I call it doin’ stuff—the ‘missing last 98 percent’) (they say I wrote the first ever Stanford dissertation on implementation—most of the faculty was busy creating the intellectual foundation for derivatives—whoops, it’s the intro—hold the cynicism for now, Tom); women as leaders (more of, lots more of) and the opportunity associated with developing products and services tailored to women’s abundant needs (world’s biggest and most underserved market); scintillating customer service (I pretty much had that space all to myself in the mid-1980s, believe it or not—everybody was doing quality, I was doing service); patient safety (grappling with a monster in the closet); and, always, always, always, the bedrock beneath every iota of my work, people first, people second, people third, people ad infinitum (still news—do you really think Ken Lewis at Bank of America gave two hoots about his staff? Well, maybe two, but sure as hell not three).

I lied again, at the beginning of this riff. It didn’t start in Danang—it started in Severna Park, Maryland, in about 1946—that makes all this 63 years in the making. My Virginia-born mom was a stickler’s stickler on the subject of manners. (You know, that Southern thing!) I bridled, naturally, but in these last 40+ years I’ve learned just how far a thank you and a yes, sir and a yes, ma’am can take you—at age 67, I still yes, sir/ma’am 19-year-old 7-Eleven clerks in inner cities. (You’ll see a helluva lot in this book about civility and thoughtfulness and manners—it was George Washington’s forte and competitive advantage, and it’s worked for me in far, far, far more humble settings.)

Manny Garcia, Burger King’s top franchisee at the time, attended a Young Presidents’ Organization seminar of mine in the mid-1980s. At wrap-up time, he said it was great, his best seminar ever, in fact, but he added that he’d learned nothing new. Instead he called it an all-important blinding flash of the obvious.

I loved that.

I love that.

Well, here goes. You’re going to get 63 years’ worth of my experience, starting with Mom Peters’ blasts from the Chesapeake past (and could she blast!), from my fourth birthday on, lessons from my bosses and sailors and U.S. Marine Corps customers during two Vietnam tours, and the insights of those three million people I’ve hung out with in my more or less three thousand seminars in Siberia and Estonia and India and China and Omaha and Oman and York, Pennsylvania.

Yup, here it comes—stuff I’ve long, long, long been itching to say.

Yup, and almost all of it is as obvious as the end of your or Manny Garcia’s nose.

Enjoy the ride.

Little

1. It’s All About the Restrooms!

I usually fly to my next seminar in the Great City of Wherever from Logan Airport. The trip from Tinmouth, Vermont, to Boston passes through Gill, Massachusetts. It’s exactly halfway, the 87-mile mark on my odometer—hence, the perfect place for a pit stop. With choices aplenty, I am nonetheless firm in my habit of stopping at the Wagon Wheel Country Drive-in. It’s, in fact, a smallish coffee shop–diner. The food, including the fresh muffins that are about a foot away as you enter (typically at dawn’s early light, in my case), is boffo. The attitude is boffo, too. But make no mistake, my custom is well and truly earned, three or four times a month by …

the restroom!

It’s clean-to-sparkling. (Come to think of it, despite the invariably crowded shop, I have never seen even the tiniest scrap of paper on the bathroom floor.) Fresh flowers are the norm. And best of all, there is a great multigenerational collection of family pictures that cover all the walls; rushed though I typically am, I invariably spend an extra minute examining one or another, smiling at a group photo from a local company dinner, or some such, circa 1930 I’d guess.

To me, a clean and attractive and even imaginative loo is the best …

We care

sign in a retail shop or professional office—and (ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!) it goes double when it comes to employee restrooms!

So …

Step #1: Mind the restrooms!

NOT A TRIVIAL PURSUIT

Today (fall 2009 as I drafted this), the recession’s tentacles continue to cling. If possible, an abiding obsession with the basics beat brilliance more handily than ever, and I can’t think of a better place to start than in the loo.

(Or a better person to put in the crosshairs than the owner or manager! Reverting to my Navy days: Owner! Owner! Man your swab!)

To do, more generally: I suggest that you devote most of your morning meeting or weekly phone call (or whatever) to the little things—from clean restrooms to deliveries made or missed to thank-you calls to a customer for her business after an order ships to flowers acknowledging lower-level staff excellence.

Keep on each other! How about a designated nag:

Little Things Lunatic.

Or: Tiny Touch Maniac-in-Chief.

(Micro-Maestro.)

(Wizard of Wee.)

(Whatever.)

And be very very very liberal with the public kudos for those who go an extra millimeter to do a trivial job especially well.

2. Small Stuff Matters. A Lot!

Fix your voice message now!

If you claim to be different from your competition, a GREAT place to start is your recorded message.

—Jeffrey Gitomer, The Little Red Book of Selling

What other little things might you do today to make a big difference in your business?

Action item: At … every … weekly team meeting, have each and … every … honored invitee (that is, employee upon whom Excellence wholly depends) bring in and present a little thing that could become a Big Thing.

Select at least one.

Implement.

Now.*

(*This item is very, very short—and I hope very, very sweet. And I know very, very doable. Hence … zero … excuses for not putting it into effect. Now.)

3. Flower Power!

(1) Put flowers all over the place (!) in the office—especially in winter and especially in places like Boston or Minneapolis or Fargo or New York or London or Bucharest. Or Vermont (!).

(2) Let it be known that the flower budget is unlimited.

(3) In the next 24 hours, send flowers to … four people … who have supported you inside or outside your organization—including, and this is mandatory, at least one person in another function.*

*I am simply, unabashedly insane about enhancing cross-functional communication, arguably business’s issue #1, via the soft arts, such as sending flowers, not just, or mainly, via sexy software!! (Be prepared for me to be repetitive on this topic, coming at it from any angle I can conjure up.)

4. Master the Fine Art of … Nudgery!

My mostly dormant but longtime interest in little things with enormous impact was rekindled after the recent publication of Nudge (Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein), Sway (Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman), and a couple of other like books. I had studied their principal antecedent, the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky, in the mid-1970s. They unearthed dimension after measurable dimension of human irrationality in a world where the myth of rationality and the likes of hyperrational economic man held center stage—and damn near every other part of the stage as well. Kahneman and Tversky again and again observed dramatic human overreaction to some tiny thing—and underreaction to some big thing. It was especially eye-opening to an engineer—me.

The central idea of the books just enumerated—and this book—is powerfully simple (as well as simply powerful): Little things can make enormous— staggering —BIG differences in situations of the utmost importance; situations that can, in health care, for example, save thousands and thousands of lives. Consider this tiny sampling of examples that I’ve collected from hither and thither in my wanderings:

Put geologists (rock guys) and geophysicists (computer guys), typically at war over dramatically different views of the world, in the same room, and … find more oil … than your separate room competitors.

Stanford University works to increase significantly the number of multidisciplinary research grants that it receives. That’s the basis for solving the world’s most important problems, the president contends. In fact, he calls it nothing less than the linchpin of that Great University’s future. One (big) part of the answer to this big issue is a mere building, a research building wholly and exclusively dedicated to multidisciplinary research—put the whole, diverse team cheek by jowl and watch the miracles of collaboration pour forth!

People whose offices are more than 100 feet apart might as well be 100 miles apart, in terms of frequency of direct communication.

Walmart increases shopping cart size—and sales of big items (like microwave ovens) go up … 50 percent!

Use a round table instead of a square table—and the percentage of people contributing to a conversation leaps up!

If the serving plate is more than 6.5 feet from the dining room table, the number of seconds goes down 63 percent, compared with leaving the serving plates on the table.

Want to make a program strategic? Put it at the top of every agenda. Make asking about it your first question in every conversation. Put the person in charge in an office next to the Big Boss. Etc. (Talk about powerful messages!)

Want to save lives? Issue everyone who checks into the hospital compression stockings to reduce the risk of deep vein thrombosis. Doing so could save 10,000 lives in the United Kingdom alone.

Want to save lives? One survivor of 9/11 had walked downstairs from a top floor—about once a month. Such trivial drills could have saved innumerable lives.

Frito-Lay adds new bag sizes, suffers no cannibalization of current offerings, and ends up creating totally new (and enormous) markets—racking up, eventually, billions in revenues.

Get rid of wastebaskets under desks—recycling leaps up.

Simply put hand-sanitizer dispensers all over a dorm, with no signs asking students to use them—and the number of sick days and missed classes per student falls 20 percent. (University of Colorado/Boulder.)

Let patients see greenery through their windows—and their average post-op stay duration drops 20 percent.

Go white (that is, paint roofs, roads, etc., white)—and reduce CO2 emissions by 44 billion tons.

Broken windows: Clean up trash, fix broken windows, stop miscreants for trivial offenses such as loitering or having open alcohol containers—and increase neighborhood safety dramatically. (Using this approach, Chief Bratton and Mayor Giuliani had spectacular success on a pretty big stage—New York City.)

If signing up to join a 401(k)-style tax-enhanced savings plan is the default option in a computer-based sign-up process … 86 percent of people will join. If they must opt in … just 45 percent choose to join. (This is a staggering, almost two-to-one difference—in a decision of enormous personal significance—and it’s based on a trivial difference in the design of the process.)

The preceding examples are merely indicative of the sorts of things (of which there are, more or less, a gazillion) that one can concentrate on. The toughest part of this message is that to do much with the idea you need an attitude. An attitude that this sort of thing can work, and a willingness to screw around and screw around and then screw around until you get it (whatever is under consideration) more or less right—and then keep fine-tuning, eternally.

LET ME NUDGE YOU … TO BE A NUDGE

Make Nudgery the centerpiece of your change strategy in almost all, if not all, circumstances. (The world may become your oyster—even if you are a junior oysterman.)

Here’s the good news about the Art of Nudgery:

(1) Amenable to rapid experimentation/failure.

(2) Quick to implement/Quick to roll out.

(3) Inexpensive to implement/Inexpensive to roll out.

(4) Huge multiplier.

(5) An Attitude required—not a one-off program.

(6) Does not, by and large, require a power position from which to launch experiments—this is mostly invisible stuff, below the radar, that most people don’t care about on the front end.

Consider:

Study* the Art of Nudgery! Practice* Nudgery!

Become a Professional* Nudgist!

(*As always, even with these so-called small things, the words study, practice, and professional are key, the sine qua non, without which there is … nothing. Thus, this not so little idea—nudgery—becomes no less than a true calling.)

Excellence

5. If Not Excellence, What?

If Not Excellence Now, When?

I’m here in this place on your palpable or electronic bookshelf because of …

Excellence.

That is, back in 1982 I cowrote a book called In Search of Excellence.

A lot of people were kind enough to buy it.

And I’ve been talking Excellence for the subsequent 25+ years.

(NB: Never write the word Excellence without capitalizing the E. This I command—not that I have the power to do so.)

I love Excellence—and not just because it paid for the farm I bought in Vermont in 1984.

I love EXCELLENCE—truth is, I think you should capitalize all the letters—because Excellence is soooooo Cool. (Cap C.)

It’s so cool.

It’s so heartening.

It’s so soaring & inspiring.

10It’s so worth getting out of bed for.

(Even in the winter in Vermont.)

It’s so healthy.

It’s so helpful to others.

(The striving more than the arriving.)

It’s so good for your morale—even on the shittiest of days.

(Especially on the shittiest of days.)

And, over the mid to long term (and in the short term, too), it turns on your customers and is … profitable as hell.

Professional driver Bill Young says:

Strive for excellence. Ignore success.

Amen. (Love it!)

(Excellence is a way of life, a way of being—not a steady state to be achieved.)

Anon* says:

"Excellence can be obtained if you:

"… care more than others think is wise;

"… risk more than others think is safe;

"… dream more than others think is practical;

"… expect more than others think is possible."

(*Posted by K. Sriram at tompeters.com.)

Amen. (Love it!)

Your takeaway: Asked how long it took to achieve Excellence, IBM’s legendary boss Tom Watson is said to have answered more or less as follows: "A minute. You ‘achieve’ Excellence* by promising yourself right now that you’ll never again knowingly do anything that’s not Excellent—regardless of any pressure to do otherwise by any boss or situation."

(*I don’t really know whether or not Watson insisted on the cap E—from what I’ve learned, I wouldn’t be surprised. I do know he loved the word.)

TP: Amen. (Love it!)

Regardless of the location (China, Lithuania, Miami) or industry (health care, fast food), I title all of my presentations:

Excellence. Always.

If Not Excellence, What?

If Not Excellence Now, When?

I hate the word motivation—surely I’ve indicated that before.

I hate it because the idea of me motivating you is so outrageous—and arrogant.

To state the obvious …

… only you can motivate you.

What I can do (as boss or even guru) is to Paint Portraits of Excellence.

And then we can imagine ourselves in those portraits—in Pursuit of Excellence.

Pursuit: Excellence, I repeat, is not a goal—it’s the